Six months ago, as the SpaceShipOne project began to look more and more promising, renewed space exploration was the topic of every conversation, and the subject of every article and headline. Even before the successful vessel touched down, though, "exploration" had dropped from the collective vocabulary of the media. Instead, SpaceShipOne is now heralding the dawn of space tourism.
Space exploration, of course, is something of a misnomer. Planets, moon and asteroids are places that can be explored, but space, by definition, is empty, and emptiness holds nothing to explore. It is this, not the engineering challenge, that has kept the emptiness between the Earth and Moon empty for the last three decades.
This abundance of nothing, and the difficulty of getting to it, has been the flaw in the drive to explore space. But a deficiency for explorers is a positive benefit for a small, specialized, but influential set of customers. Nothing, and far away, is the perfect formula for the casino.
Casinos thrive on remoteness: remoteness from the ordinary, and from the inconvenience of legal restrictions that govern the behavior of people and the movement of money. A desert is perfect for this; hence Las Vegas, a locale so uninhabitable that with the exception of a little too much gravity, it might be interplanetary space itself.
Earth orbit is to Las Vegas as Las Vegas is to Cleveland. Just as Nevada has become a family vacation destination, its remoteness cancelled by regular airline arrivals, space beckons, more exclusive in every way than the desert, and with a better view. Developers of billion-dollar casinos in an ocean of sand can only see building in sandless space as the next logical step, with about the same price tag. It is no coincidence that there is a classic casino called The Frontier. Frontiers are the natural habitat of easy money, easy marriages, and all other easy things that keep themselves hard to get to. The only institution more attracted to less legislation than a casino is a bank, and never were two agencies more appropriate for each other as the vertical margins of society start to become available.
Not actual riches, then, but the prospect of them, is what will drive customers into space, and that should come in the end as no surprise. Gambling thrives on making something out of nothing, and nowhere is there more nothing to be found than four hundred miles up in space, looking down on the lawful.